Location-based applications such as “Loopt” running on mobiles in a wide-area-network require frequent updates of very short messages to be transmitted by mobiles to the access point, e.g., base-station, in the uplink and by the access point to the mobiles in the downlink. Since the location updates are on the order of few tens of bits but must be transmitted and received every few seconds, it is very costly, in terms of control messaging overhead, to require that this information exchange take place using the regular wide-area-network traffic channels. In addition to location updates, in various other types of applications, e.g., social networking applications utilizing localized peer to peer communications for primary communications, there are also needs to communicate relatively small amounts of information relatively frequently in an efficient manner. For example, it may be advantageous to be able to communicate small amounts of peer discovery information in a local region in such a manner. While transmission of data by mobiles in what is known as an active state where mobiles have dedicated resources including, e.g., data traffic channel resources, the number of devices that can be supported in an active state at any given time is relatively limited. To increase the number of devices which can be supported WAN systems also normally support a sleep state in which a device is not subject to closed loop timing and/or closed loop power control and also lack dedicated traffic channel resources. In a typical wide-area-network, there may be thousands of mobiles in a “sleep” state at any given time. Mobiles in a sleep state normally lack dedicated channels for traffic data and normally must transition to the “active” state through a complex hand-shaking procedure in order to be assigned dedicated traffic channel resources prior to sending or receiving meaningful data including very short messages of the type discussed above. Thus, the overhead associated with sending short messages for devices in a sleep state can be considerable due to the resources required to enable the transition to an active state.
Based on the above discussion there is a need for methods and apparatus which provide an efficient means of communicating small amount of information frequently in a wireless communications system. It would be advantageous if such methods did not require large amounts of signaling overhead. In addition, it would be desirable if some methods and apparatus were scalable, e.g., capable of supporting implementations with small numbers of users as well as implementations with large numbers of users.